As with last year the event took place in the Mission Bay Center, San Francisco, California. The event was slightly earlier this year, positioned at the beginning of January instead of the end. The event format changed slightly compared with the previous year and also included a 3rd day of general discussion and hacking in the WMF offices. Many thanks to everyone that helped to organise the event!

I have an extremely long list of things todo that spawned from discussions at the summit, but as a summary of what happened below are some of the more notable scheduled discussion moments:

Recently Wikidata celebrated its third birthday. For the occasion I ran the map generation script that I have talked about before again to see what had changed in the geo coordinate landscape of Wikidata!

The hotel (Valpre-Lyon) was absolutely beautiful with large grass areas, great architecture and a place for you weather you wanted to have a large or small discussion, sit quietly or sit outside. As well as Pétanque, table tennis was also available as well as plenty of people to meet!

I planned on primarily hacking on my MassAction extension along with one of two others but as at any hackathon I got massively distracted talking to people and working on other projects. Continue reading

Wikimania 2014 was a 2000+ person conference, festival, meetup, workshop, hackathon, and celebration, spread over five days in August 2014, preceded and followed by fringe events. Wikimania is the official annual event of the Wikimedia movement, where one can discover all kinds of projects that people are making with wikis and open content, as well as meet the community that produced the most famous wiki of all, Wikipedia!

The core event was held in and around The Barbican Centre in London, UK.

The Open Data Weekend was fringe event to the Wikimania conference this year. It took place in Frobisher Room One at The Barbican Centre in London on the 5 & 6th of July and was well attended.

The weekend included:

Discussion about how open data, specifically Wikidata, is helping the Wikimedia movement as a whole covering its current integration with sister projects such as Wikipedia and Wikisource as well as future integration with these as well as Wikimedia Commons.

A general discussion on open data and the philosophy and the Semantic Web technologies.

Exploring various tools and applications that run and depend on the data stored within Wikidata and Wikimedia projects.

Unfortunately I am writing this post in 2015 and various details have fallen out of my mind… Luckily there is an EtherPad that contains lots of notes!

This year the Wikimedia Hackathon was held in Zürich, Switzerland from the 9th to 11th May 2014. The organization of the event was great, from lanyards and badges that included a USB memory stick to a city map and a ticket for public transport, Wikimedia Switzerland had prepared fantastic hackathon.

More than 150 developers, engineers, sysadmins, and technology enthusiasts gathered coming from more than 30 countries aiming to share knowledge about new and existing technologies, fix bugs, come up with new ideas and work together on tools and systems relating to the Wikimedia movement.

As the name suggests a lot of time at a hackathon is spent ‘hacking’ (coding and such) there are also workshops available on all days. This year these workshops and talks included multiple sessions on ‘Vagrant’ working toward a production like development system, ‘Open data’ looking at Wikidata and government open data as well as sessions of ‘Phabricator’ and ‘Jenkins’.

Hackathons are not just a place to hack, but they provide people with a crucial time to allow people with different specialisms and interests to meet each other in person, put faces to names and names to pseudonyms, to build relationships and in turn build the movement.

At noon on the following day all hacks were presented to the API partners and all other attendees. The ‘News sightseeing’ hack was awarded a swag pack from Wikidata for making the best use of the API. They were also awarded the Axel Springer iPool and Getty Images prizes.

Firstly it is important to say that at the time of the hackathon Wikidata didn’t really provide any good way to query the data it help, simply retrieve it, but luckily there was a query tool available that is currently located at https://wdq.wmflabs.org.

Initially the code uses the 3rd party query tool to find a list of items matching the criteria in the query, the current query in an editor can be seen here or in the image below. The criteria basically look for items in Munich that are NOT roads but do have images and coordinate locations.

The data for each item is then retrieved from the Wikidata API using the wbegtentities module.